Toulouse-Lautrec’s La femme tatouée: ‘They were his friends… he treated them as equals’

As the 19th century drew to a close, a trend was developing in European society — for tattoos. Its origins lay in the impact of Captain James Cook’s pioneering voyages to the Pacific a century earlier, when he and his crew had met people with artistic marks all over their bodies. The English word ‘tattoo’ — like variants of it in other European languages, such as the French tatouage — derives from the Tahitian word tatau.

Body-marking permeated all levels of society. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Queen Olga of Greece and King Oscar of Sweden each had a tattoo. It’s rumoured that Queen Victoria, the monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, also had one — of a Bengal tiger fighting a python. To keep up with the demand for self-adornment, the American Samuel O’Reilly patented an electric tattooing machine in 1891.

Three years later, a woman with a tattoo featured in, and provided the title for, a remarkable painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Called La femme tatouée, it is being offered in the 20th/21st Century: Evening Sale at Christie’s in London on 9 October 2024.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic family in the town of Albi in south-west France in 1864. Unfortunately, a congenital bone disease known as pycnodysostosis meant that he was unable to enjoy hunting, hawking and other outdoor pursuits in the way that his male ancestors had done. He grew no taller than five feet high, and walked with painful difficulty.

‘If my legs had been a bit longer, I would never have painted,’ Toulouse-Lautrec once said. It turned out, however, that he was very good at painting indeed. In the early 1880s he moved to Paris, where he became friends with Vincent van Gogh, a fellow student in the atelier of Fernand Cormon. Toulouse-Lautrec had little time for the grand kind of academic pictures that Cormon produced, however, preferring to depict the lives being led around him.

Among the chief settings for his art were Paris’s maisons closes — legal, regulated houses of prostitution. He produced around 70 works behind their doors, capturing everyday moments in the lives of the women who worked there.

In the case of La femme tatouée, we witness a quiet exchange between two figures as one of them is dressing. The woman in the background helps the one in the foreground to tie the elaborate red bows and ribbons of her chemise.

There is a casual intimacy in their exchange as they ready themselves for the evening, an ease that suggests they know each other well. (The same unnamed duo appear in another of the artist’s compositions from this period, Femme tirant son bas, today part of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.)

La femme tatouée was executed in Toulouse-Lautrec’s trademark technique, à l’essence — by diluting his oil paints with turpentine to create a fluid medium that was easy to apply and suited the quick-fire way he liked to make his strokes.

As with his celebrated scenes set in nightclubs and dance halls, Toulouse-Lautrec’s focus here lies chiefly on his figures. Surrounding details of the maison close are only loosely indicated, such as a small pot on a sideboard, and what appears to be a mirror on a wall, in which the two women’s reflections are glimpsed.

When it came to his figures, the artist was a master at reducing them to their essence and focusing on a few key physical characteristics. The titular blonde woman in La femme tatouée has a small nose, full cheeks, pillowy lips, a soft jawline and, of course, a tattoo inked on her upper arm.

That tattoo consists of a semi-abstract pattern of swirling, interlocking lines — and, below that, a series of marks which might be numbers, initials or a name, perhaps an ode to a loved one. While the meaning behind the marks eludes us, Toulouse-Lautrec grants them prominence within the scene, emphasising the way in which the dark ink punctuates the woman’s pale skin.

As elsewhere in Europe, tattoos were highly fashionable in Paris at the time of this picture’s painting, influenced in part by sailors and officers returning from Pacific voyages. Professional tattooists were setting up dedicated shops and parlours across the city.

Part of Toulouse-Lautrec’s inspiration may also have come from Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut prints, which proliferated in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. He himself was an avid collector, and one might see his choice of subjects inside the maisons closes as a homage to the courtesans of Edo who featured in works such as Kitagawa Utamaro’s 1794 series, The Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarter.

In some of these scenes, Japanese courtesans were tattooed, the characters inked on their arms often a reference to a lover who occupied their thoughts. Given that Toulouse-Lautrec’s protagonist has her eyes closed, is it possible that she is lost in her memories, dreaming of the person who captured her heart and inspired the art on her arm?

‘These women are alive,’ said Toulouse-Lautrec of his subjects in the maisons closes. He thought that artists’ models, by contrast, were so lifeless they looked ‘as if they were stuffed’.

He enjoyed remarkable access within the establishments he visited, spending extended periods of time there. On the evidence of his paintings, the women were relaxed in his company, and felt comfortable as he observed and depicted their everyday activities, from lunching and dozing to playing cards. Men are noticeably absent — as is any sense of eroticism. ‘They were his friends,’ said the cabaret dancer Jane Avril of the artist’s subjects at the maisons closes. He ‘had an uplifting effect on them… He treated them as equals.’

La femme tatouée has been in the same family collection for more than a century, having been acquired by an ancestor of its current owner in 1922. Before that, it was almost certainly included in Toulouse-Lautrec’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Manzi-Joyant in Paris in 1896.

His scenes of maisons closes were separated from the rest of the show, locked in a back room and available only for a privileged few connoisseurs and collectors to view. Toulouse-Lautrec himself kept the key.

He said he didn’t ‘wish to create a scandal’, aware of the criticism he might receive for his choice of subjects. Far from being scandalous, however, pictures such as La femme tatouée reveal Toulouse-Lautrec’s great sympathy towards the subjects in question.

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale is on view at Christie’s in London, 3-9 October 2024. Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century autumn sale season in London and Paris, 1-22 October